Ideas, Interactions and Experience Design

So here’s a post around a topic I have been pondering over quite some time now. I had a brief discussion with my brother couple of days back and here I am writing this down because I think it might make myself more clearer. Inputs, criticisms and thoughts are most welcome.

For the start, so when Bret Victor wrote a Rant on the future of Interaction Design and questioned the visible trend of a “picture under glass” vision to interaction design, I had my own tint of thought on the importance of fingers in interaction design. My judgement about the importance of fingers (not one single finger) still stays strong, however the rant questioned

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

The conversation between the voices in my head started from the rant and it had now come so far that I am going to talk about some on-the-verge technologies which, I believe, can seriously turn how Human Computer Interaction progress in the seemingly far off future.

So when Miguel Nicolelis conducted the Monkey & Joystick Experiment in which Aurora, a monkey is made to play a game using a joystick while its neural activities are recorded. Later the joystick was removed and the researchers were able to simulate the joystick movements just from the brain signals from Aurora as such she realized she can play the game without the joystick. Here’s the TED talk on the experiment.

As a designer, visualizing abstract concepts and communicating it to the users effectively has always been one major area which always interest me.

Although it has probably been some time now, I am sharing an amazing video [less than 10 mins] which illustrates how Einstein’s picture of gravity works. It’s not difficult to understand the setup but in any way, in case you want to make your own Space-Time Set-up, here is some detail [1.43MB, pdf].

The space-time warping was demoed at a PTSOS workshop at Los Gatos High School in 2012.

Even though I had big plans of covering the entire ceremony, being a family member, I was caught up with responsibilities and was unable to do so. However, here are a couple of photographs me & my brother took which (I think) will provide a peep into how a Manipuri wedding goes like. By the time, let me get my hands onto the professional shots.

Recently I’ve been doing my own little research on ‘Animation for Interaction Designers’. I feel there’s has been little emphasis on this area from the majority of the Interaction Design community despite the fact that several UI & interaction model rely heavily on animated transitions & effects that brings the continuity.

Here, I just made a quick collection of a couple of interesting animated effects & transitions. I think a pattern library of these kind curated by Six UX is going to be a useful resource for the young designers out their looking for inspirations.

Recently, for a small event at college, a couple of friends: Ashwin & Kislay and I decided to prepare a “flickering dance lighting system” for a dance session. Well it was nothing sort of a biggie but the whole effort was well put.

Basic Setup: Testing out with Arduino

With a very basic setup of 12 AC bulbs coupled with the help of AC relays to trigger the circuit, the setup finally took shape to let the AC bulbs flick as per the amplitude of the song.

This post has been long due. Thought I would bring back my blog alive & so, here I’m (a couple more posts shall follow suit).

Earlier this summer, I worked as a User Experience Design intern at the Bangalore office of Google India.

As indicated from Quora threads as well, I think students who are planning to apply for their Design internship at Google are curious about the whole selection process. I’m here writing down how it went with mine. The process is different for an engineer & a designer & so this post maybe relevant only to a designer.

Selection Process:The process started around Dec 2012 when details of the internship opportunity came through my university channels. First we had to submit a very basic 2 pages resume & portfolio. The portfolio carries only brief summary of all design projects I’d done so far.

For the ‘Soft Prototyping’ module, as part of an introduction to physical computing, I worked on a very small Arduino based project called “Dustbinator”. The project is a very small scale project which was carried out as an exploration of how Arduino works and how can we leverage it’s capabilities using a wide range of sensors.

The Dustbinator project uses an Arduino and an IR sensor to indicate trash level in a dustbin.

As a semantics & communication theory exercise, I redesigned a color shade card keeping usability, in terms of functionality and scalability, as the main objective when secondary objectives like highlighting new shades, highlighting new or extra quantity tubes available are present.

The following is the first crude version of the shade card.

The first version of the shade card

Considering the semantics & the functionality aspect of the Shade Card, a couple of issues accompany this design.

As part of the Usability Evaluation Course, I had to read a lot of research papers on a topic of my choice. I opted for ‘Wearable Device in Interaction Design’ which apparently is a very huge and hot research topic.

The presentation below is the result after going through several research papers on the area.